Onboard Manuals Now in PDF Format

--Blogpost written by Bob

Back on January 7, 2015 I published a blogpost about updating our onboard equipment manuals--it was an update in that the manuals matched our current onboard equipment.  At that time I thought about simply putting them into electronic format but we had plenty of space for storing hardcopy manuals at the time.  Here we are 16 months later and we are completely revising our system for the primary reason that we need to use the shelf space for other things that we know we will need.

Carrying the large binders full of equipment manuals to our car reminded me of
lugging large engineering text books around my 
college campus a long time ago.

We decided to store all of our user's manuals (except for our Yanmar engine service manual) in electronic format (PDF) on two different devices:  my new Apple laptop and my iPad.  The likelihood that both these devices fail when we need to look something up in a user's manual during our 8-month per year cruising period is very remote.

I found most of our equipment manuals online in PDF format.  For the few we couldn't find online, we scanned the originals into PDF format.  It only took about a day to get all our equipment manuals into PDF format.  (I did this on one of the many rainy days we've experienced lately.)

We're now using the shelf space (previously used for equipment manuals) primarily for guide books.  We previously kept these guide books in several different places, some on the chart table.

This stack of guide books stored in the corner of our chart table reduced
the amount of space for spreading out our large chart books.

We are now using the shelf space below the chart table for our guide
books--this was previously used for binders 
full of equipment manuals.

With all the guide books removed, our chart table has ample space for
our large chart books but it will most likely;y be used just for my laptop
and our log book.  (I wonder how long the chart table will stay this clean?)

This simple little project cost next to nothing and freed up a lot of valuable storage space.  I'm hoping that our next blogpost will be Part 2 of our AIS receiver installation...

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